Seamus' Story

11:19 pm - 01/31/2012

So apparently Mitt Romney once had a dog. His name was Seamus...

If you thought Mitt Romney strapping his dog Seamus to the roof of the family station wagon while driving for 12 hours to Canada in 1983 was a curious sort of incident at least(OP: Um, wut) — and a display of a crisis management style with too much “management” and scant little humanity — a recent report that Seamus ran away on reaching Canada will not surprise you. PolitickerNY‘s Hunter Walker cites a “trusted Politicker tipster” who says that “two of Mr. Romney’s sons had an off-record conversation with reporters where they revealed the dog ran away when they reached their destination on that infamous journey in 1983.”

The story of Seamus’ odyssey or, rather, ordeal was first reported in a 2007 Boston Globe article. Romney says that Seamus was placed in a “completely airtight kennel” that he was “comfortable” in. The Boston Globe reports that Romney’s oldest son, Tagg Romney, alerted his father to a “brown liquid .. dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours,” whereupon Romney stopped the car at a service station, hosed down both dog and car and resumed driving. Two weeks after the Boston Globe article, Mitt Romney’s sister Jane provided a photo of the Irish setter and said that she had never heard of the riding-on-the-roof story until the Boston Globe article appeared. She also said that Seamus had been sent to live with her family in California.

Such a report of Seamus finding a home out west would belie PolitickerNY‘s latest account, that Seamus sought “asylum” in Canada. While Romney has certainly been taken to task by the likes of New York Times columnist Gail Collins and PETA — Newt Gingrich has based an attack ad entitled “For the Dogs” on the incident — he seems to have emerged relatively unscathed from “Crate-Gate.”

Newt Gingrich is on the attack against Mitt Romney, over his work at Bain Capital, over his record as Massachusetts and now over how he treats his pets.

A web ad released today by the Gingrich campaign revives the story of a Romney family road trip 25 years ago during which Romney strapped a dog carrier, with the family’s Irish setter Seamus inside, to the roof of his station wagon for the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, Canada.

Word of Romney’s dog-on-the-roof, road-trip seating chart infuriated animal activists and pet owners during his 2008 White House bid after a Boston Globe story detailed the incident.

At a campaign event in South Carolina last week, a protester with a sign that read “Dogs Against Romney” greeted Romney supporters while standing next to a car with a stuffed animal dog strapped to the roof.

“This is a completely air-tight kennel, mounted on the top of our car,” Romney says in the ad, defending his dog placement in a Fox News clip. “He was in a kennel at home a great deal of time as well. It was where he was comfortable.”

The video then shows white words flashing across a black screen: “Imagine what Obama would do with a candidate like that.”

The ad, titled “For the Dogs,” includes six other clips of Romney’s most often-cited verbal gaffes including his “corporations are people too” argument at the Iowa state fair, his “I like to fire people” statement earlier this week nd his “$10,000 bet” from a GOP debate last month. As of now, the ad will not air on television, Gingrich spokesman RC Hammond said.

Gingrich and Romney are squaring off for an ad battle royale in South Carolina. Super PACs supporting the two candidates have announced ad buys that total a combined $5 million in the Palmetto State .